For Scott Bessent’s US$20-billion bet on Argentina to pay off, a lot of things have to go right – things that in the past, in Argentina, have tended to go wrong.
The US Treasury secretary announced a lifeline Thursday that’s designed to pull the country’s financial markets out of deepening turmoil, and a close political ally out of a hole. The United States is offering swap arrangements to shore up the peso – and it’s already stepped in directly to buy the currency, a move with few precedents in recent decades.
“It’s not a bailout at all,” Bessent told Fox News late Thursday. To a lot of observers, still waiting for the details to be fleshed out, it sure looks like one. It’s been delivered by an administration that promised to put America first, to a country with a track record of squandering other people’s money and defaulting on its own debts.
Argentina’s President Javier Milei – perhaps the Trump administration’s strongest backer in Latin America, where superpower rivalry with China is heating up – has vowed to leave all that bad history behind. He says he’s finally putting the country’s public finances in order and getting a grip on rampant inflation, even if it means taking a chainsaw to the budget.
Financial markets believed him until a
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